EDEM Updates Flagship Software

EDEM released the latest version of its flagship software. EDEM 2018 focuses on productivity and performance and includes features and enhancements that aim to enable users to speed up their workflow from setup to processing and analysis of simulations, the company reports. This release also introduces coupling solutions with finite element analysis software Abaqus from Dassault Systemes, SIMULIA and Multi-body Dynamics tool RecurDyn from FunctionBay.

Here are some of the highlights of EDEM 2018:

The EDEM Creator includes new tools that will primarily benefit users designing heavy equipment in the construction, mining, off-road and agriculture industries who are simulating machinery interacting with large beds of material.

A new contact model for modeling complex cohesive materials such as fine dry powders, organic materials, soil and ore fines is now available as a standard built-in contact model in EDEM. This model, called Edinburgh Elasto-Plastic Adhesion (EEPA), offers a solution for cohesive granular solids whose behavior changes depending on the stresses experienced by the material beforehand. It can help realistically simulate applications such as material adhesion to earthmoving equipment, soil-tyre interaction or for instance a cohesive powder compaction process such as tabletting.

On the processing side, the GPU solver is now fully double precision. In addition, users making use of EDEM’s Application Programming Interface (API) will be able to use the GPU solver with their custom models.

A range of enhancements have been applied to the EDEM Analyst for faster and advanced visualization and analysis.

A new feature enables pre-defined queries to be exported while the simulation is being calculated, enabling users to review results without having to wait until the end of the simulation or stop the simulation. The speed of data export has also been improved as well as the speed of graphing. New analysis methods have been added, including sensors for velocity profile, total mass, segregation and bulk density, providing quicker access to commonly used analysis methods.

On the visualization side, a range of enhancements have been included enabling users to make more realistic and dynamic videos. This includes notably the possibility to track a geometry with the camera as it moves, switching views automatically at a specified time, adding realistic textures to particles and geometries, changing opacity of particles as well as the capability to have different views and graphs side by side using the multi-view window.

New partnerships with Simulia and FunctionBay now enable the coupling of EDEM with Abaqus and RecurDyn. This means users can transfer realistic bulk material loads from EDEM to their FEA and MBD tool of choice.